Michael Roy

Michael Roy, 1973, La Rochelle

Michael Roy’s work is particularly the doing without doing: making a movie without a camera, making an artwork based on preexisting images or texts, a fiction based on other fictions. He crosses universes. He combines universes. He invites us to appropriate his works and fictions with the purpose to let us create the ours. He uses the process of cyanotype to realize photographs without a camera. Michael Roy’s cyanotypes depict portraits of people in extase.

The situation’s backgrounds are impossible to decrypt, because no additional information is provided. We can just imagine. We have to envision the context.

In the work “The secret Diary of “, Michael Roy has used a written text by Jennifer Lynch. He blackened all patronymic names. By doing so, he transforms the history of Laura Palmer to an anonymous history, which allows us to put our projections into it more easily. From fiction to reality, from common to personal: the artist constructs a complex as well as familiar body of work by using sometimes facts, sometimes fictional elements, by mixing partially written texts, images or photographs, by playing and erasing the traces. We are close and far away at the same time. These stories belong to us but differ, well known and strange.

www.roymichael.com